I Asked 1,000 People to Complete the Sentence, “The Tories Are….”

You’ve probably read the news over the past few days. Someone somewhere has spent enough time playing with Google Autosuggest (and it wasn’t even me this time!) to discover that the Tories appear to be getting off a little bit lightly.

Google, “Labour Are…” and the following comes up:

On the whole, not particularly nice.

Repeat the exercise for, “Liberal Dems are…” and you’ll be treated to this:

You can do the same for SNP and other smaller parties too. But do this for “Tories are…” or “Conservatives are…” and you get a bit of a blank look from Google:

What Britain Thinks the Tories are – Uncensored.

Given that we couldn’t get our lighthearted entertainment at the expense of Cameron and Co from Google Autosuggest, I went out and got it myself by asking 1,000 people (using Google Consumer Surveys) to complete the sentence:

The Tories are….

I’m not getting into a political debate here, but you can see for yourself the most common results in this word cloud:

The top responses

Let’s take a look at a word cloud of top responses.

And here are top 15 responses:

The top answer was the oh-so-state-the-obvious-sitting-on-the-fence, “in power,” follows in second place by “wa*kers,” or some close variant of it, which took 3.1% of the vote, equating to 31 of our 1,001 total answers.

The Witty Answers and Political Rants

Some of my personal favourite responses were the one offs and the answers given by just a handful that didn’t even come close to topping the poll:

3 people answered “sexy.” Yes, really.

3 people answered, “cool.”

2 people gave a very solid British response of “not my cup of tea.”

1 person felt the need to turn this quick survey into a soapbox with the answer, “out of touch, rich, privileged. trying to screw the low earners. The very word ‘Tory’ makes me sick. Vile deluded people who have no idea what its like to live in the real world. would love to be rid of them.” Ok, then…

The Raw Data

Bit of a spreadsheet geek? Want the full story? If you fancy sifting through all 1,000 opinions on the Tories (and there are some gems in there), with gender, age and location information of respondents, you can download it by clicking here.

If you’d like to dig a bit deeper and would like access to the Google Consumer Surveys to create gender, age and location based word clouds, Tweet me (@staceycav).

The Data

The data was collected via Google Consumer Surveys on 4th and 5th February 2016. The respondents were in the UK and aged 18 and over.

And yes, I’m fully aware that the answers could be completely skewed based on the political views of the specific audience seeing the survey. But hey ho, it’s just a bit of fun!